I'd like to see more than 500 recent changes on a MediaWiki installation (through Special:RecentChanges). According to this thread this limit is hardcoded in includes/specials/SpecialRecentchanges.php.
I don't want to meddle with MediaWiki core, is there a way to get more than 500 changes without changing SpecialRecentChanges.php?
If the only way to achieve this is by changing SpecialRecentChanges.php, does it suffice to increase this number and what are the possible side effects?
You can change the proposed values with the parameter $wgRCLinkLimits, e.g. with the value $wgRCLinkLimits = array( 50, 100, 250, 500, 1000, 2000 ); in your LocalSettings.php.
As you saw, there is a hardcoded limit in includes/specials/SpecialRecentchanges.php; it was 500 before MediaWiki 1.16 and it is 5000 since (MediaWiki 1.16 was released in 2010 and is no more supported), and it is not possible to display more entries than this number (without patching MediaWiki).